Fireworks aren’t the only things going off today Ignite your social media – for the better!

Social media is slowly becoming an integral part of a business. Through social media you can communicate with your followers on a one-to-one basis through private messages or responding to comments, or on a large scale with status updates and tweets.

Whatever your business does on social media, you’ll be seen by everyone, which is why it’s very important you follow these do’s and don’ts in order to ignite your businesses social media accounts! Let’s start with what you should do while online:

Do…

  • Know your customers – You’ll have to research your target audience before you even set up your profiles. It can be bad for business if you’re looking to connect with the wrong group on the wrong social media channel.
  • Be active (but not too active) – The key to this one is time. When you start you’ll want to post more to increase your brand awareness, but over time your audience is not going to want to see 5 posts a day from you. Make sure you research to find that balance.
  • Get your posting timing right – Statistics show that customers on social media engage more with social content that is shared out during lunchtime and also around 5:30/6pm. These are times when your audience may be on their lunch break, or heading out of work, so they’ll have the time to go online and look at your content and engage with it.
  • Uniformity – If you have more than one social profile, make sure that the tone of voice is the same. You don’t want to be using all the technical language and content on your Facebook profile, then comical content on your Twitter profile. Consistency across your profiles will ensure that you keep your dedicated followers and avoid confusion.
  • Share – To be seen as the go-to social profiles to follow in your certain field, you need to be sharing content daily. This doesn’t mean sharing out things from your website, but sharing external news from other websites. This is a great way to connect with fellow professionals in your topic of business.
  • Customer service – With social media, you are giving your customers access to your business 24/7…even though you aren’t open that long! This means that at any point in the day, someone could tweet or message you asking for help. It’s your job to make sure that you are providing the best customer service to them, whether that means replying back to them at a ridiculous o’clock, or apologising the next day and offering them the help they need.
  • Have a personality – Everyone loves to see a business having fun on social media. Each post needs to emphasise what type of business you are, and how you want to communicate with your customers.
  • Be original – This is the single most important part of social media for businesses. You need to be original! This means you need to be finding or creating new and original content and sharing it, while also finding other content and sharing it with your personal twist.

Don’t…

    • Like your own posts – this can make you come across as arrogant, and rather than drawing customers in can push them away!
    • Neglect your profiles – Did you know that 2.3 billion people have social media accounts? Therefore having an online social media presence is extremely important, as you can reach a large amount of potential and existing customers. Having an online social media presence also builds and maintains the reputation of your brand as well as building solid trust and relationships with your customers. You can let your customers know what you’re doing and when, putting out social platform exclusive offers and news.
    • Overshare – oversharing can turn customers away as they may grow fed up with your brand if you’re posting things hourly every day. Instead, post two or three times a day across all your social platforms.
    • Follow everyone back – following all your followers will clog up your social media accounts and also means you’ll be following irrelevant accounts. Following lots of people can make your social media profiles look spammy, and dissuade potential customers from wanting to engage and follow you. Be selective with who you follow, and only choose accounts who you think take a genuine interest in you.
    • Spam – spam is never a good thing! Spam is guaranteed to make your followers unfollow you instantly, so only post spam-free content.
    • Delete negative comments or reviews – deleting negative reviews or comments is not only dishonest, but by responding to negative comments or reviews these can actually work in your favour You now have the opportunity to turn the negative comment around and win over your unhappy customer by redeeming yourself as well as with your customer service skills

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to do social media, so hopefully these top tips will spark your businesses social media and get it off to a banging start!

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